A Womans Worth
A Dream About Melania & Trump
I woke up yesterday morning with a headache and the residue of a strange, heavy dream. I had fallen asleep after watching Melania Trump’s statement about Epstein, and something about the way she was speaking caught me. She was reading from a script, looking at the cameras intermittently. When you truly have nothing to do with something, you don’t need a script. You can look people in the eye and say so. I sensed shame in her, though I couldn’t say exactly what kind. There are many configurations shame can take. Shame at being pulled into something and shame of what others may think. Shame varies greatly.
Anyway, the dream. There was a train, but it was moving sideways across the tracks, long but horizontal rather than forward. It was full of women. Then there was a property, but it still felt in style like a luxurious train with many rooms with people in them, and some of those people’s bodies began to melt because weapons disguised as beautiful things were being tested on them by putting them close to their bodies. Then there were coins placed on a boy’s head, and Trump grabbed them as he knew they were toxic, and as he did, the dust from them dissolved Melania into a stone statue, half her body. And she was trying to pull the stone casing off herself. Then I was trying to escape something, and my own body began to distort, fingers became half fingers and changed shape, and legs and toes morphed. I was aware I was losing my body and became scared. And then something shifted, and I understood it was a transformation rather than dissolution. Then I woke up.
There were also religious-type people; there were a few different types. The gifts were poisonous and were doing things to people’s bodies and skin. Melania seemed to be the main player in the dream. She was standing with her back to an ornate fireplace with a huge mirror. When Trump removed the money from the top of the boy’s head, the coins disintegrated, the dust travelled her way, and she turned into stone from the chest down, and she tried to rip off the concrete surrounding her body, and then I woke up. The train was an entire train, but it was not moving vertically. It was moving horizontally.
When I look at this dream through a psychological lens, particularly the work of Carl Jung and Marie-Louise von Franz, it does not read as random imagery. It reads as a process. Something is being broken down, exposed, and reorganised.
The train moving sideways gives the first signal. A train implies a known direction, a track already laid, and a collective agreement about where something is going. But this one is not moving forward. It is moving across itself. That creates the feeling of being inside a system that is in motion but not in truth. The fact that it is filled with women brings in the feminine not as an individual quality but as something collective, something shared, something perhaps inherited or conditioned.
The beautiful objects that are, in fact, poisonous point very clearly to a split between appearance and reality. Something that looks refined, desirable, even elevated, yet harms when brought into contact with the body. The detail that the skin is affected matters. The skin is the boundary. It is where the self meets the world. This suggests a breakdown in trust at the level of contact, what is allowed close, what is absorbed, and what is believed.
The coins placed on the boy’s head introduce value. Coins are about worth, meaning, and exchange. Here they are toxic. They are placed onto innocence rather than being chosen. Even when removed, they leave behind a residue that causes further harm. This carries the sense that something presented as valuable may in fact be corrupt, and that even recognising and removing it does not immediately undo its effects.
The image of the feminine turning to stone is a moment of complete arrest. Movement stops. Feeling stops. Life becomes fixed. Yet there is effort within it. She is trying to tear herself free. This suggests a form of the feminine that has been held in place, possibly through image, role, or expectation, reaching a point where it can no longer remain as it is.
The mirror and the fireplace hold that image in a very particular frame. Reflection, presentation, containment. Warmth that is controlled rather than alive. A composed environment in which something is maintained. Within that, the freezing occurs. It suggests that what is being held together on the surface is no longer able to sustain what is happening underneath.
The masculine action in the dream recognises toxicity and removes it. It is decisive and direct. Yet that action is not without consequence. It releases something else into the environment that leads to further transformation. This suggests that seeing something clearly and acting on it is not the same as fully resolving it. There are layers, and actions have effects beyond their immediate intention.
The most important movement in the dream is the shift in my own body. The distortion, the loss of form, the sense that something fundamental is slipping. This is experienced first as fear, as though identity itself is dissolving. But then there is a recognition from within the experience that this is not destruction. It is transformation. That moment changes the entire meaning of what is happening. What appears as loss becomes reformation.
Taken together, the dream reads as a movement away from appearance and into embodiment. Away from inherited or imposed value and into something that must be felt and known directly. It suggests that what has been held in place, what has been presented as correct or beautiful, may no longer be viable. And that the process of that breaking down may feel like losing shape before it is understood as becoming something else.
What remains is not a fixed conclusion but a question that sits in the body. When something appears right, what does it actually feel like in contact. And when something begins to lose its form, is it necessarily a loss, or could it be a change that has not yet found its new shape?
After the dream, something else came into view. A woman called Amanda appeared, and I saw her Twitter account. There had been tweets, then removed tweets, where she made it very clear that after being involved with Epstein and then being deported and held by ICE for a few months, she is very angry with Melania. What stood out was the timing. That tweet was made the night before Melania went on stage to read her script.
Women cannot push women sideways. This feels like a very important point. I have seen this in my own life. My mother used the abuse of my father towards me as though I had done something wrong as a little girl, and she pushed me out of the house at fifteen so she could maintain a relationship with her new boyfriend. Women can no longer do this to women. Actions by a woman, knowing the vulnerability of women, do not go away.
I am also aware that the files have resurfaced after weeks of disappearing from the public eye due to war and the launch of Artemis. Those files are not just about Epstein and the rich and powerful. They are about something collective. They reflect an agreement that contains a great deal that harms people, women, children and men alike. It feels like a moment where we are being asked to see more clearly that actions which affect others negatively cannot continue to be tolerated.
These figures arrived in my dream unbidden. I did not choose them; the psyche did. My dream is not political; I have no interest in politics. I am interested in the psyche and what happens in dream states. The psyche filters everything in its own way, and I find the dream world endlessly revealing in its content and imagery
Penelope Ryder is a Hypnotherapist, astrologer, mentor, and writer completing a book on trauma and survival. She writes about psychology, astrology and the inner life at Substack www.peneloperyder.com